All posts tagged ‘jazz’

I’m going to tell you a story about my high school days. For the first three years of high school (in the UK it’s from age 11 – 16) music lessons were compulsory. Early one year our teacher (who can best be summed up with the words “Professor Umbridge”) handed us all a sheet of music and asked us what the different symbols represented. When she got to me, she asked me to tell her what a note meant, I said I had no idea because I’d never read music before. (“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be teaching me?” I wondered silently.) She told me not to be stupid, my mother clearly wouldn’t have let me reach the age of 13 without this vital skill. “No,” I repeated, “I have never learned to read music.” That week was parent’s evening and she repeated this to my mother in the way you would report a child caught telling a lie. My mother was unimpressed and backed me up, the teacher finally relented but from then on treated me the way you would treat something you found lurking under a rock, clearly anyone whose family didn’t teach them to read music was someone she didn’t want around. She never even tried to teach me to read it, instead I was left behind to muddle along while the rest of the class were criticised for not writing the next great symphony as a homework assignment.

I dropped music as fast as I could and finally managed to regain a love of it once I wasn’t trying to mentally dissect it. Now I’m a huge fan of orchestral music, especially scores from the likes of John Williams, Carter Burwell, and Mark Snow. I don’t want to pass on this complete lack of musical theory to our son so when I was offered the opportunity to review A Jazzy Day with him I was happy to oblige. A Jazzy Day is an iOS app aimed at preschoolers with the intention of teaching them about the different instruments that make up a jazz orchestra; the way they look, how they sound, and how they all work together. The game was created by The Melody Book using live musicians and original music so the pictures and sounds work together beautifully. It can be played in either English or Spanish, however you will need to go into your iOS device’s settings menu to make this change as it cannot be done inside the app.

A Jazzy Day takes the form of an interactive book which can either be read aloud by a man with a smooth New Orleans accent, or you can choose to read it yourself. The story follows an anthropomorphised male cat taking his two kittens to meet the all-animal jazz orchestra at the big band hall while subtle jazz plays constantly in the background. The instruments are introduced in logical groups beginning with the rhythm section and progressing through the horns. On each page tapping the instruments begins an animation where you see them played by a different animal. My favourite has to be the guitar playing squirrel—he just looks so totally lost in the groove. Eventually, the entire orchestra has been introduced and appears together on one page allowing you hear them all play together. At the end of the story you can take your photo with the two kittens using the front camera on your iOS device and the picture will save to the camera roll. You can choose to move forward and backward through the story as you choose, spend as long as you like on any given page listening to the instruments there (the vibraphone page is great as the instrument is fully playable) and there’s also the option to jump directly to a specified page from the main menu.

Along with the main story there are two additional activities available. The “learn” button opens a screen filled with illustrations of the different instruments introduced in the story. Tapping them makes the app speak the instrument’s name out loud and plays a snippet of music so you can hear how it sounds. The game option gets you to answer various questions to test your knowledge of the instruments and their sounds, such as showing an illustrated picture of an instrument then asking you to find it among a large group of others. Most of these are quite simple, however expecting a preschooler to be able to notice the subtle difference between a tenor, alto, and baritone saxophone seems to be asking a little too much in my opinion. My two-year-old could consistently find the instruments that he saw but still cannot locate the correct saxophone except by luck. The other question the game asks is sound based where a snippet of an instrument playing will be heard and you have to select which instrument played it. Perhaps this is my complete ignorance of music coming through but I cannot tell the difference between a flute and a clarinet even now and as of today, my toddler just guesses when presented with these questions. However, I do hope they will start to teach him things I can’t as he gets older.

My two-year-old refers to this app as “cat game” and has played it a lot in the time we’ve had it; his four- and nine-year-old cousins were also interested in it during a family trip and both sat and listened through the story at least twice that day. My son is most interested in the story and, impressively for him, will sit quietly and read through the full thing—even waiting for the narration on each page to finish before turning the page. I love the app as it manages to teach my son about a, let’s face it, very noisy topic without becoming an irritating distraction in the room, although if you’re not a fan of jazz music I imagine it could be mildly annoying at least. In fact the only change I’d make (after removing two of those three saxophones from the games), is to separate the visual and audio questions in the game and allow you to select one or the other, a very minor issue indeed. I would love to see more apps from The Melody Book introducing other styles of music and new instruments in the future. This game will not turn your child into a genius (I am no believer in The Mozart Effect) but hopefully it will begin a lifelong interest in music, lay down the first foundations of musical education for later life and be the first step towards your child wanting to play an instrument—something I still regret never doing.

A Jazzy Dayis available in the iTunes App Store for $2.99. A copy of this app was provided free for this review.

My kids love jazz. We can listen to John Coltrane albums on endless repeat thanks to a single animator, Michal Levy, who explores “the visualization of sound.” When my daughter was a few months old, my husband discovered Levy’s animation for Coltrane’s Giant Steps. She was riveted.

We showed the animation to our 1-year-old and he had the same response. Every time he sees a computer screen he points at it with a “That! That!” until we play him a video, though he’s come to prefer a different Michal Levy animation, One.

I’m a visual person, so I thought that it was primarily the animations that grabbed baby’s attention. But when we listen to albums (Giant Steps in particular), the jazz has a soothing quality that captures their attention in a similar way, even still for my daughter who is now six.

All images from Theft! A History of Music courtesy of Jennifer Jenkins, James Boyle, and Keith Aoki

[Read part 1 of this series about the upcoming graphic novel Theft! A History of Music and the history it reviews and part 2, which discusses how copyright entered the picture.]

Imagine a 20-year-old musician publishing his work today. Let’s pretend he’s living the fast and reckless life of a rock star and will die young at 45. Because the copyright term has been ratcheted up to life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years from publication for corporate works), you won’t be able to sample his work without permission (for your heartfelt tribute song, of course), until 2105. But since you’re not living his rock star lifestyle, maybe you can hang on another 95 years to grab your chance.

“We are the first generation in history to deny our culture to ourselves,” Jennifer Jenkins said.

Furthermore, as the new year approaches, we’ll soon again “celebrate” Public Domain Day, January 1, which is the day when works entering the public domain in a given year do so. But as I explained for this year’s non-celebration, because of copyright changes and extensions, there will be no previously copyrighted works entering the public domain in the US until 2019.

Under the law as it stood until 1978, most music would go into the public domain in 28 years, which would put works from the 80s into the public domain now. But the new terms have been retrospectively applied, sometimes applying to dead musicians, who presumably have other things to worry about besides their copyrights.

Copyright law has a built-in, careful balance between control and freedom. And we haven’t just added a few marbles to one side of the scale—we’ve dropped an anvil on it. Outside of a conscious choice to release work to the public domain or to use a tool like Creative Commons, nothing you or any of your contemporaries creates will be available for building on, which was not the case for the works of Brahms or Beethoven, or many of the giants of jazz, blues, or rock ‘n roll.

The real tragedy is that we’re unlike the classical composers and rock ‘n roll pioneers in another way. We have the Internet. Remixing software. Sharing tools. The technologies we have now offer anyone unprecedented opportunities for creating and sharing music. We live in a time that has the potential to be the most creative period in history. But the law is constraining that possibility by making those activities illegal.

“The gap between what technology is enabling and what the law is disabling is growing,” Jenkins said. This gap will restrict the creativity to the fringes, rather than push it to the mainstream, which in the long term is the culture that is preserved and maintained.

So what do we do about it?

We could roll with increasing regulations. Lose your Internet connection for file sharing. Take away artists’ rights to terminate recording contracts. We could go even further. Jail someone for singing in the shower, or for merely thinking about a song. (Those supporting the latter have probably heard me play Karaoke Revolution.)

Or we could turn around and march toward a future of digital revolution and cultural anarchy.

Neither extreme is particularly attractive. To say that we would be better off with a more balanced system is not the same as saying that we should abolish copyright altogether, much less that downloading music is a fundamental human right. But culture should not be degraded for a business model.

What if we could imagine a more balanced debate that includes the interests of artists and creators, record companies, civil liberties, digital freedom, and technological development—not just one of them. By looking to and learning from musical history, we can learn how to treat the fundamental components of how music is made.

Jenkins and her co-author and artist, James Boyle and Keith Aoki, expect to release Theft! A History of Music under a Creative Commons license in the spring or summer of 2011.This series was originally written for opensource.com.

Images from Theft! A History of Music courtesy of Jennifer Jenkins, James Boyle, and Keith Aoki

Why did Plato argue that remixing should be banned by the state? What threats did jazz and rock ‘n roll pose? And what does all of that mean for the conflicts between artists and copyright today?

Those are the questions Jennifer Jenkins, James Boyle, and Keith Aoki answer in layman-friendly language in Theft! A History of Music, a graphic novel expected next spring. The three have a previous comic book, Bound by Law, which (like Theft!) attempts to translate complex legal concepts to make them accessible to a wider audience through a friendlier format.

Jenkins described the current state of things as the “music wars.” We witness this as a battle between those pirating and remixing without authorization against the record companies that are resorting to legal means to try to sustain their increasingly obsolete business model. But according to Jenkins, “Research shows that both are inaccurate and ahistorical. The history of music can teach us a lot about today’s debates.”

And when she says history, she really means history. Her earliest example is Plato, who wrote in The Republic:

Music and gymnastic (must) be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when anyone says that mankind must regard…

The newest song which the singers have,

they will be afraid that he may be praising, not some new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet;

for any musical innovation is full of danger in the whole State, and ought to be prohibited.